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Re: More proof, if you needed it...

Terrorism - the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.

Interesting, by that definition state-sponsored terrorism cannot possibly exist, because sponsorship is clear authorisation, and thus such acts could only be war or violent government repression, such as in Syria and the Ukraine.

Re: Some companies can't move

There are quite a few applications that don't run under 8, as several compatibility layers are gone.

There are far more that do not officially support 8, although they might actually run. Businesses can't take the risk that they will find an issue and be told "Sorry, but we don't support that application under Windows 8"

Finally, the completely new interface means retraining every single one of your users, having all of them take a productivity hit while they learn it, and your internal Helpdesk being overwhelmed by calls/external Helpdesk charging you a lot more for increased call volume.

So Windows 8 carried a large risk and high cost, yet with little to no benefit.

As a standalone or home user you could very well like or even love it, but that doesn't make it a sane choice for business.

Re: IOS 7 issues +1

Re: Why?

In summary, Windows 8 x86 runs the Windows version just fine, and Windows 8 RT has a minuscule installed base, apparently no Java (really!?) and thus would be incredibly expensive to do and lead to very few sales.

Re: @Richard12

Now I want to correct somebody who seems to think that money now on a variant of the "gold standard", when it isn't.

Net (after all money-in-bank) UK national debt is over £1,254,000,000,000

Does the UK government really have that much in physical assets? It doesn't matter because we can keep servicing the debt and inflation means the real cost of the debt goes down over time.

Banks don't have the assets to repay all their liabilities - they bet the company on no more than a small number of loans going bad. In 2008/9 a few of them lost that bet.

Foreclosing loses money, that's why they try to avoid it if possible. I pay my mortgage because I don't care if the bank loses money, I don't want to lose my house!

- On a small scale, inflation means my mortgage payments get more affordable as time goes by.

Government are afraid of too much inflation as that can kill the currency, and of deflation as that kills their borrowing. They need it to be just right.

The difference between Bitcoin and GBP is that there are hundreds of millions of people who are confident that GBP will still be valuable in 25 years time.

Very few people are confident that Bitcoin will exist at all by then, expecting it to have been replaced by something else.

Who is right remains to be seen.

Real currencies have gone down the toilet more than once, with hyper-inflation wiping out everything (Germany, Peru etc). A new currency was then created - the government and country still existed, but the old currency became worthless.

Re: Bit confused here

This means that the currency has no support from an asset base which traditional currencies do, cause for concern?

The 'mainstream' currencies like USD, EUR, GBP etc don't have such an asset base either, and neither do any of the banks you store your cash in.

All governments that have their own currency continually print more in part to fund their borrowing - as inflation is the most effective way to reduce the debt burden of a country. (That's why several of the Eurozone countries got into so much trouble - they couldn't inflate their way out of the debt mountains.)

There's a reason why 'traditional' banks fear a "Run on the bank", and that's because none of them actually have the assets (let alone liquid assets) required to pay out more than a tiny percentage of the savings in them. Banks borrow for short periods and lend for long periods, that's what a bank is. Your salary is what they borrow, and things like government bonds and mortgages are what they lend.

All modern currencies work by fiat - they work because they work.

The reason any currency pulls off that trick is because the general population have confidence that they will still be able to exchange the bits of metal, paper, plastic or numbers stored on a computer somewhere they've never seen for tangible goods for a reasonably long time in the future.

(The people providing services need confidence they can buy tangible goods, like food, with the currency you're offering for that service. If they can't, they won't accept it.)

It's the idea that the cash will still be valuable next week, next month, next year etc that sustains a currency.

The moment the holders of a significant amount of a currency lose confidence in the future, they'll exchange it for something else, the value slumps (so inflation skyrockets) and boom! The currency dies.

How much for 2TB?

For that you can buy complete replacement local hardware (two HDD and the enclosure) every two to three months!

Even Seagate's aren't that bad!

That pricing is just crazy, nobody would pay that for a domestic/small business scale storage system, even with automatic offsite backup.

At $199 up-front with a small monthly covering the offsite backup and replacement local disks past the 3year warranty period (basically life insurance for HDDs) they might have a business, otherwise, nope.

Re: Quality

The UK's commercial broadcasters generally don't go for quality in order to get revenue. They make most of their revenue from advertising, and the remainder from their subscribers and the TV licence.

High-quality TV is extremely expensive to make - that's why it's so rare.

If the BBC turned fully commercial then they would obviously reduce their quality because that makes them more profit - and the existing commercial channels would be able to reduce their quality further as they'd be compared to a worse quality of programming.

The BBC keeps the commercial broadcasters honest - and not just UK ones, because every broadcaster around the world is compared to the BBC.

On top of that, the commercial broadcasters would get less revenue because most of them get a small cut of the licence fee!

Are you serious?

Phasing is always retained in a 2 (or more) channel system. Seriously, claiming it isn't is audiophoolishness of the highest order.

However, compression will introduce some artefacts and by its nature, lossy compression discards some data. That's nothing to do with it being digital or not - vinyl is a form of audio compression that introduces its own artefacts and discards some data.

Ask yourself one question - How was the audio master recording made?

Everything commercially recorded in the last decade was recorded digitally, using a digital mixing console.

Live sound in practically all but the smallest events uses a digital snake - that's a digital signal path from the microphone preamp to the line-level output to the amplifiers, and in many cases the amplifiers take that digital signal directly.

Those of us who work in the live events industry find comments like the above quite laughable.

Not in this case

If I understand correctly, this company is in the business of sending out letters that say "Send us money or we will sue you".

They haven't filed a case at that point and probably don't intend to.

Outright extortion really.

If they have actually filed the cases then they'd be risking actually having to defend it in court, not to mention frivolous lawsuit rulings as it would only take one company director to have a lawyer friend take it on "pro bono".

USA should love metric

Re: Power Consumption

Definitely! The clock speed escalator basically stopped five years ago or more ~3GHz is it.

Over the last few years the only way to make your software go faster has been to utilise more cores (be they CPU or GPU, in one or many boxes). If you can't then your software is basically never going to go faster no matter what hardware is thrown at it.

The only notable difference between my 4-year old Intel desktop and the latest desktop CPU from Intel is that the new one has 2/3 of the power consumption and double the number of virtual cores. The per-core performance is completely unchanged.

Erm, not really.

If the legacy Windows application is 32bit and runs under 32bit Windows 7 then it will also run under 64bit Windows 7 unless:

A) The developer is particularly stupid and packages 64bit DLLs.

(And yes, that happens. Often.)

B) It talks directly to external hardware.

16bit Windows and DOS applications on the other hand - nope, ain't going to happen.

And yes, there are a lot of those in many businesses and most users aren't going to understand spinning up a VM.

Most of the above programs won't run at all under Windows 8.1 of course, usually because they were breaking the "rules" in Windows XP. For some unknown reason, MS chose not to put Win7's carefully built compatibility layers into Win 8. Odd.

Re: What I want...

The best damn display they can make, lots of inputs with good A/V routing and integration with external devices - and nothing else.

It won't be cheap because a good display isn't cheap, and there are lots of things to differentiate - just look at computer monitors - eg colour gamut.

I don't want them to waste time, effort, components and my electricity on features that I'll never use and which are out of date before the TV even ships, because there are loads of STBs that already do it better.

On top of that, even the consumers who do use the "smarts" etc to start with will have replaced those with external units a long time before they replace the actual display.

Perhaps the worst offenders are the "top end" stuff - a top end customer has multiple top-end external A/V sources and a top-end sound system already and will be replacing them on a rolling basis.

So a top-end display that includes "smart", tuners and speakers is utterly pointless as none of the customers will ever use any of them!

@roger stillick - Work at height is dangerous work.

Falls from height remain the most common cause of workplace fatality. In 2008/09 there were 35 fatalities, 4654 major injuries and a further 7065 injuries that caused the injured person to be off work for over 3 days or more, due to a fall from height.

That's the first thing you're told in work-at-height and harness training.

@Hans 1- Wind is very dangerous.

Have you ever seen a wind turbine? Ever been to the top of one?

Building and maintaining a wind turbine requires complex work-at-height in a location deliberately chosen to have high winds, be far from habitation (thus rescue/hospital) and nearly always in places where the weather and visibility are highly changeable. On top of that, there's also the additional power lines that must be run out to the installations.

Offshore wind is far, far worse, but not included in the data up to 2007. (Few to no plants online.)

Rooftop Solar PV was unfortunately worse, as again it's work at height, and unfortunately the workers tend to be less well trained and protected and so have more accidents.

As of 2007, rooftop Solar PV, Hydroelectric and Wind were the three biggest direct killers per unit of energy generated.

If you include deaths due to mining/extraction accidents and estimates of deaths due to particulates, coal comes out as the most dangerous (mostly due to China mining practice), followed by oil then biofuels, gas, hydro, solar PV and wind. Nuclear is the safest by an order of magnitude.

Exclude China, and coal becomes safer than oil and hydro becomes safer than wind (mostly due to one accident in China that killed 171,000). Presumably China will slowly come down to this 'rest-of-world' level as their workforce safety improves.

Wind turbines are however getting more dangerous, as new ones are being built in 'marginal' conditions - eg offshore.

AC, that's a straw-man.

Climate change itself is not the debate. Yes, it's happening.

The debate is what we can and should do about it.

And right now, practically every single thing that's come out of the politicians has been ineffective, expensive and harmful. In some cases it's even increased CO2-equivalent emissions, in all cases it's cost way too much and responsible for deaths - in some cases directly. (Wind power is ****ing dangerous.)

- People will always min/max any defined-rate subsidy, creating the maximum subsidy for the minimum effort.

The subsidies for solar PV and wind installations have just cranked up the cost of energy, with very little effect on actual CO2-equivalent or and none whatsoever on climate change.

Had the same money been spent on research, or even simply insulating homes, we'd be in a much better situation!

And it does have button classes. Also swiping ones and flicking ones. You're moaning about an API you've clearly never tried based on a brief description of an early Alpha that explained how to create a custom "button class", and ignoring the features of the beta and released.

Personally I'm not keen on Qt Quick, but that's no reason to slag it off.

Re: All in the phrasing

You're assuming that the panic-stricken PR droid was telling the truth, when they were almost certainly digging around for anything that wouldn't make them look bad, or possibly in breach of the spirit of the law.

If it really meant 'resolved' then it'd say that.

This is a company culture thing, and clearly indicates a "please go away" internal support culture rather than a "how can we help you".

No, that's an opinion

Economics being the fuzzy trick-cycling that it is, you can find lots of eminent economists utterly convinced that the ConDem policies have shortened and shallowed the recession, as well as a few saying that they lengthened and deepened it.

However, the general consensus is that a Labour coalition would have bankrupted us instead, causing a full-scale depression and hyper-inflation.

Though it can't be proven, partly because economists are trick-cyclists, but mostly because Labour have had no plans at all other than "Not what the ConDems say" throughout most of their opposition.

Heck, I still have no idea what Balls and Miliband actually stand for or believe, unless it really is just the "Not Tory" stance they've been following.

Erm, no, it may well be back.

If it had a significant effect on sales, then there will be a repeat.

You forget what "Cyber Monday" is for - it's to give the online shops a good time to get rid of the year's old and over-stocked items by knocking down the price a little and letting hysteria over Christmas clear the warehouse, ready for next year's stuff.